Retail

A large Dutch retail organization with over 400 stores needed a better solution to drive the performance of the different store types in all regions. A new management dashboard is developed which enables corporate and regional managers to control and compare sales quantities, revenue, and cost. The solution is based on the Business Objects XI Enterprise platform, where Dashboard Manager, Performance Manager and the analytic 'Store Assortment Optimization' application are being used to monitor and optimize growth and profitability up to SKU level. 

Roles/responsibilities
IT Project leading, analysis, design and development of all dashboards and reports, training of users and administrators

Platform
BI frontend
Business Objects Enterprise XI incl. Dashboard Manager, Performance Manager & Retail Analytics

Datawarehouse
ETL: Informatica Powercenter
RDBMS: Oracle 10g

Source system
* Custom database (Oracle)

One of the largest Dutch movie and game rental chains had major challenges in integrating the data from the 200+ rental outlets and making this wealth of information available for marketing purposes. Secondly there was a need to combine rental information with the data available in the Navision ERP system. The approach taken here was to first modernize the backoffice infrastructure and standardize on one BI solution from Business Objects. After solving the problems in the primary information delivery process (performance, fragmented information, data quality, different tools and technologies, and lack of knowlegde) the Direct Marketing process has been re-engineered. The Set Analyzer software from Business Objects enables the organization to segment customers based on rental behavior and selecting the optimal sets of customers for the different marketing campains. This case has been presented at a Business Objects user conference and is available as a 'Customer Spotlight' (in Dutch).

Roles/responsibilities
Project management; analysis, design and configuration of new infrastructure; implementation of Business Objects Application Foundation; design and development of ETL solution, universes and reports; training of users and administrators

Platform
BI frontend
Business Objects 5.1, Application Foundation 6.1

Datawarehouse
ETL: SQL Server 2000 DTS
RDBMS: SQL Server 2000

Source systems
* Navision Financials 2.6
* SQL Server 2000 (custom)